Chaotic AI Markets: Focus on what you can control

Brian Gracely: Foreign. Good evening, wherever you are, and welcome back to the Enterprise AI Show. I'm your host, Brian Gracely, coming to you from Raleigh, North Carolina, home of the Stanley cup champion Carolina Hurricanes. Good to, Good to finally get that out there. It's been fun watching that. For those of you that aren't hockey fans, sorry, but you know, when your local team wins the world championship, it's a lot of fun. We had the, uh, big celebration, the big parade yesterday, and it's been, it's been a party around Raleigh for the last week or so. So good times also today. Happy, happy Father's Day. To all the fathers out there, to all the, you know, to, to my dad, to Aaron's, you know, Aaron's father, to, you know, everybody who, you know, gets a chance to talk to dad. Give him a call today, you know, let him know what he's meant to your life. Uh, you know, hopefully he's still around for you and uh, you know, but also thank you for all those that are around us, that help us dads, you know, do the things that we do and, you know, try and provide for. For families and others like that. So today I want to dive a little bit into the, The Father's Day theme. Not to get too wrapped up in it, but, you, uh, know, I got to thinking about, you know, if I was. If I was trying to explain my dad kind of some of the. The insanity of the market that is, you know, kind of the uncertainty, the insanity, some of the craziness that's going on with the AI market right. Right now. And I was explaining it to him, say, like in the 1970s or the 1980s, before technology had become, you know, sort of, uh, you know, the center of everything we do. You know, I got to thinking about kind of the things that he would always tell me just in terms of, you know, just how to, how to prepare yourself, how to deal with uncertainty, how. How to evaluate a situation and determine what role you should play in it, where you could be successful, where you should. Things that you should avoid. And so I thought what I'd do is I would take some of the, uh, situations that we have going on with AI right now. Again, some of the uncertainty that's happening, some of the just. Pace of change that's happening, and apply some dad reasoning to it, which I try and do. I think about it myself as a father, as I'm thinking about my kids. How do we prepare them for a world in which, you know, maybe AI is heavily involved, maybe it's not Heavily involved. I'll dive into a little bit of that. Uh, we're going to get to all that right after the break.

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Brian Gracely: And as I mentioned, uh, you know, today, at least here in the United States, I don't remember if it is around the world, I should probably look that stuff up. But today's Father's Day, so happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there and, you know, sons and daughters of fathers and things like along those things. Um, but, you know, I was thinking about it and you know, as many of you know, if you work in tech, you're probably getting questions from friends, family, from colleagues, from people that if you tell them that you work on anything having to do with the newest technology, whether it's AI or something else, there's always questions about it. Hey, how does it work? Do I need to learn about that? Does that apply to me? It does seem to be that with AI because it has such a personal impact on people. So many people have actually touched the technology, as opposed to small number of people that have touched Service Mesh or small number of people that write Java code or have had to worry about scaling out AWS instances or something like that. But if you talk about AI, not only have most people played around with it in one way, shape or form, whether they are talking about, hey, I use ChatGPT to help diagnose that weird mole that was on my arm, or they said, hey, I use this thing. And uh, it said it had AI built in and it kind of did something whether they liked it or not. Um, so everybody has some sort of experience of it. And then obviously we're seeing a lot of things in the news on a daily basis, whether it is AI impacting the financial markets, whether it's AI impacting jobs, whether it's AI impacting, you know, some sort of, you know, video that, you know, your grandmother or somebody might have sent you, and you have to send it back to them and go, oh, no, no grandma that, you know, I know that's really weird and crazy, but that's AI. So it has a, you know, has had a personal impact on a lot of people. And as I was thinking about Father's Day, you know, you sort of, you know, whenever there's holidays or days, you know, kind of important days, you, you tend to think back and go, okay, you know, let's put some things in perspective. And you know, I think about my, My dad. My dad has been, you know, kind of loosely involved with technology. You know, he was, he was an accountant, but he worked for a company that, uh, ultimately one of the companies he worked for made mainframe computers. Not IBM, but a different company. You know, he was somebody who, you know, went out and, and purchased a personal computer early in the cycle. We had an Apple computer back in the late 70s or early 80s. I'd have to look at the exact date. But if, you know, he was very interested in, like, how we could use this technology, you know, to, to improve what he did. Right. He was a, uh, he was an accountant and, you know, he was, he was learning about sheets and all those sorts of things. And so he's somebody who has tried to keep up with it. Obviously, I've been involved with it for a long time. He asked questions about it. But a lot of times we would talk about things and we Would talk about, hey, the stock market is way up for some company. And him being in the financial world would always sort of be like, okay, let's get back to why is it what it is? So he was always trying to understand kind of the fundamentals of things. He didn't necessarily always understand all the technology, but always wanted to understand the fundamentals of things. Uh, because, you know, as a dad, or as a father, as you're talking to your kids, you're trying to give them some sort of guidance. And in some cases you've got lots of experience, unfortunately, you've got scars and scabs and, you know, history in some domain in which you can help your kids out. And you can either, you know, help them be better at that or help them avoid some sort of mistake or help them, you know, do something you know, better than you did because you now have some experience that you can pass along. And so, you know, you oftentimes would, you know, as I was doing different things in my career or, you know, whether it was taking a new job or, you know, like, how much I was traveling or whatever it was, he always would sort of come back to being like, okay, let's look at kind of what's really going. Help me understand this sort of stuff. And so, uh, I made a list of sort of sayings that he was always kind of sayings and concepts that he was always trying to put in my head to try and rationalize what was going on. Because again, we see this a lot with technology. Technology tends to repeat things whether or not it's. People tend to think, oh, that's brand new, it's totally different. But in a lot of cases, if you've got some historical context or if you are following kind of fundamental types of things, you can, you can look at situations, especially when situations feel overwhelming, feel confusing, feel chaotic, and you can start to sort of apply some things to that. And again, I think about this from the, uh, from a dad's perspective, like, how would I give some guidance to stuff? Because I know one of the questions that, that I get all the time from people is, okay, so you work on something that has to do with AI and people, you know, people kind of go, hey, I've, you know, I've used it a little bit and it's, it's interesting. Maybe it does some interesting stuff, or people say, uh, ah, it's not for me, won't, won't apply to my job. But oftentimes, you know, anybody you talk to as a parent is always Thinking about, well, how does this relate to my kids, right? Like, my kids are going to be in this marketplace of jobs, whatever those jobs might be for the next 20, 30, 40 years, depending on how old your kids might be. Or maybe they're older than that, 50 years, if your kids are, you know, single, uh, digits or in their teens or something like that. And those are the things that, you know, you start having questions, you know, you start having conversations about, you know, like, I don't totally know what the answer is. Or, you know, it's really hard to predict what the next five years will look like, let alone the next 20 years. And you sort of put things like the Internet in context, or mobile phones, or now we have cars that drive themselves. All that kind of stuff is hard to put in big context of stuff. And so when I think about those things that my dad used to try and tell me and I try and pass along to my kids, they are much more fundamental. And so I've made a list. I think I got seven or eight, nine, ten things here. Seven or eight things that I think are sort of good to come back to, especially when markets feel kind of, kind of crazy, right? And the first one that, ah, you know, he used to say a lot, and it was sort of in the context of work, but it was also in the context of, I had a summer job, I was a golf caddy. And he said, you know, a lot of times you're going to. You're going to go into situations in which you don't totally know what's going on. You may feel like you don't totally belong. Uh, maybe it's a situation in which, you know, it's people that are executives that are up, you know, at a higher level than you are. Maybe it's. You walk into a room and you feel like, okay, I'm not the smartest person in this room, or I'm not the most wealth person in this room, or I'm not the most experienced person in this room. And his thing, you know, he always used to have a saying. He'd say, you know, show up, keep up and shut up. And what that ultimately meant was it wasn't meant to be derogatory. It was, you know, make sure you're always showing up on time, right? Being there, actually showing up, being there a little bit early is something that, you know, surprisingly seems very simple. But not a lot of people do keep up meaning, you know, uh, pay attention to what's going on, right? You're not always going to know what's going on. But do your best to keep up with what's going on. And that could be reading what's going on. That could be just paying attention to the conversations that are happening. Don't get yourself in a situation in which you're kind of blindsided by things, and again, you're not going to know everything, but try and keep up with kind of what the gist of the conversation is, what the general information that's needed to be in that room. And this third thing was, if you don't know what you're talking about, if you don't know the right thing to say, if you don't know, you know, what the norms of the room are, whatever he said, sometimes you just got to shut up. Sometimes you just got to listen. You just got to kind of take it all in. Don't try and force something that you don't really understand. And I think to a certain extent, with AI, there's a lot of people that might be worried about it. And, you know, if you think about it in the context of your job, you got to keep going to work, you got to keep showing up, you got to keep doing what you need to do on a regular basis. And. And that repetitiveness that, uh, sort of, you know, just drumbeat that you're. That you're dealing with, you got to kind of deal with that. The second thing he would always say is, you know, try and make yourself invaluable, right? Like, try and figure out a way that what you do is. Is not only very valuable to the people that you're around or the company that you're with, but try and make yourself invaluable. And that doesn't mean hoarding information. That doesn't mean, you know, kind of gatekeeping stuff. It means, you know, make it so that not only are you very good, at least one thing at what you do, also let the people around you know that you're good at that, right? Like, you don't have to go about bragging about it, but make sure that they're aware that, like, hey, when these things happen, this is the person you go to, right? So sort of make yourself invaluable. And I know AI is trying to democratize a lot of skills, and obviously you hear these crazy topics of, like, AI is going to be able to do all these different jobs, but make sure for the job that you're with, the people that you're with, the skills that you have, that you make yourself as invaluable as possible, right? And not just knowing that you're good at what you're doing, but let people let you know, make it, make it outward that you're good at what you're doing. Right. Third thing he would talk about all the time. A lot of times I would come to him and I would say, dad, you can't believe this is going on and this is going on and this is going on, and so on and so forth. And he would say, a lot of times when there's so many things going on, you got to focus on what you can control, right? So if I think about this, like, I have no way of controlling when, for example, now that Anthropics Fable and Mythos Security, LLMs have some certain band to them and they're prevented. I have no idea when that's going to, that ban is going to go away. I have no idea, you know, when things will open up. I have no idea. You know, I have no way of controlling those things. I have no way of controlling what it cost to, you know, for OpenAI to, you know, deliver their service. And they're losing billions. And maybe that has some downstream effects. Maybe somebody's using ChatGPT and you're worried, like, well, don't get too hooked. Uh, you know, don't, don't put too many things in ChatGPT that might go out of business. You can't control those things, right? So you got to focus on what you can control. You know, you can control if you are asked to use these tools, figure out how to be good at them. You know, figure out how to take advantage of them in ways that benefit you. You know, figure out how to spend an extra 15 minutes a day learning these things, but control the things you can control, the things that you can't control. It's, it's useful again to make yourself, you know, show up, keep up and shut up. You know, pay attention to what's going on in the room. But if you can't control it, you shouldn't be spending too many cycles worrying about it. Uh, because again, uh, you know, those are just cycles that you're not spending. Getting better at something, becoming valuable, understanding, understanding the why of something are happening. You know, the next thing I had is, sort of goes in the same lines, is be an expert at something, right? You're not going. You can't be an expert at everything, but be an expert at something. And again, this kind of goes back to making yourself invaluable. You want to showcase that you've got some distinct knowledge, distinct talent, that maybe is, you know. Yes. Could somebody figure out a way to do what you do through AI and other stuff? Yeah, probably. Right. Like, we're, we're seeing some pretty incredible things, but become the expert at the nuances of why that relates to your business. Um, become the expert at the nuances of how the output of that stuff is going to fit into, you know, becoming the thing that, that is useful for your work or useful for your family or whatever that is. But, but find some areas where you can, you can be an expertise and again, that sort of, you know, kind of reinforces itself on. Focus on the things that control versus the thing that you can't control. Next thing, he always sort of told me again, you know, a lot of times I would come to him with, you know, dad, here's 10 problems. And I'm trying to juggle these different. 10 different problems. And a lot of times it had to do with work stuff and, but it also relates to people. He said, you know, when in doubt, you know, when things seem really chaotic, ultimately the two best things you can do is, number one, get closer to people. Make. Build relationships. Make sure that you've got relationships with people. You don't just think about, like, well, I know that company, or, you know, there's a group of people that, you know, I could call if I needed to make sure you've got personal relationship with people, get closer to those relationships, uh, strengthen those relationships. And then he also said, figure out where the money, where the revenue is made in that world, whether it's the business world or things that you have to do with your friends or whatever, and get closer to that. And I tell this to people all the time, and we'll see this with AI as well. The further away you are from either. Even if you're in the middle of where something's built, if you're not close enough to the people that make the decision as to whether to buy something, to whether to use something, whether to spend money on something, create the budgets for something. The further you are from. From those people, the people that are the people making the decisions and where the money is going. The more they don't know what you do, the more it's hard for them to realize, like, well, you know, is. Is Bill better than Steve? Is Mary better than Jane? You know, so when, when things kind of get in doubt, figure out ways to get closer to the people that are making those decisions, have relationships with that stuff, and then get as you can to where the sort of the money piece of it takes place because again, uh, those are high value places to be. Those are places in which again, technology makes less of the decisions. A lot of times people make more of those decisions. So kind of keep that in mind. The next thing he had on his list or that we always used to talk about. And again, a lot of these things go back to this idea of like, when things feel like they're crazy again in the AI world, it feels like, gosh, all this money's being spent, feels like money's being lost. You know, there's crazy amount of things that are happening. They're talking about job losses. You know, it just feels like a lot of things, there's a lot of choice in what's going on when things don't make sense. Focus on fundamentals. And those fundamentals could mean a lot of different things. They could be, um, you know, if your biggest worry is, hey, I'm concerned about my job, you know, focus on the fundamentals of what that, what would that mean for your own personal finance, right? Do you have, you paid off your bills? Do you have money in the right places where you can get to it, uh, relatively easily? Maybe it's, you know, you're worried about, you know, you're really stressed at work and so on and so forth. Are you focused on your health, right, on those fundamentals? Are you making sure that, you know, I know you're busy with work, but like, are you eating good things? Are you getting at least a reasonable amount of sleep? Are you drinking a lot of water? Are you getting out and going for a walk every day for 15 minutes? Like, focus on those fundamentals. It may be the fundamentals of just, uh, I need to get better at this aspect of my job. If I don't get better at this aspect of my job, those five other aspects of my job, I'm building them on a very weak foundation. I'm building on the foundation of sand as opposed to a foundation of stone and rock and cement and so forth. So you'd always come back to being like, focus on the fundamentals of whatever that thing is you're doing or the thing that you're worried about, and again, try and control what you can control. Again, a lot of these things sort of are kind of self reinforcing. They kind of tie back to each other, um, but they're a little bit different. The other thing we would talk about a lot, like when the Internet was first starting off, which again I've talked about a lot, has a lot of parallel as what's Going on in the AI space, we would talk about, hey, it's crazy. This company is way, way up. And they're not. It's weird that they're so far up, but their revenues aren't necessarily as much as this other company who's not up as much. And, uh, I was trying to make some sense out of it because maybe I was asking him about investment advice or, um, should I go work for some company because they offered some sort of equity in something? And he would always say, look, it's important to understand that the way you're rationalizing these things, like, hey, does this seem like a good company? Does it seem like a solid company? Do the fundamentals of that company make sense to the, the cash flow? He would say, you know, a lot of times markets can be irrational way longer than you can be solvent, right? So this is, you know, kind of, again, kind of plays to the idea of sometimes markets are going to seem weird. You're going to do the math on the markets are, you know, it's not going to make any sense. And you might think, oh, well, this is a perfect opportunity for it to flip and I'm going to figure it out and it's going to flip. And, you know, his thing was always like, you know, be very careful that you understand the market better than somebody else. Even if you have done all the math, the timing of things is oftentimes the biggest deciding factor. Not necessarily did you figure out the math?

Narrator: Right.

Brian Gracely: You can go back to that movie in the book, the Big Short, right? Those guys figured out the math, but their timing had to be right, otherwise they would have gone bankrupt. They happened to get the timing right and the market collapsed and all those sort of things. But those of us, for example, that were in the middle of the Internet bubble, we couldn't see the other side of it. We couldn't imagine with all this growth, with all these things going on, that at some point something would tip over. And I think right now with the AI market, there are people who are distinctly on one side that the market is incredibly irrational. There are people on the other side that are incredibly positive about it, even though the numbers don't necessarily make sense. And if you're trying to bet on exactly where it's going to pan out, those irrationalities, both on the very negative side and on the very positive side sometimes because emotions involved in addition to math and other sorts of things, those can remain longer than your rationality at this moment in time. It's important to understand that, not get too Hung up on it. And again, go back to those things that we talked about before. Your fundamentals, understanding some aspect really well, being an expert, regardless of if markets are up or down. And then the last thing, this goes back to an old hockey analogy. There was an old saying for the guy who was the best hockey player at the time, a gentleman named, uh, Wayne Gretzky. They would say, wayne, why are you so good at hockey? How come you seem to be so much better than everybody else? And he would say, well, I try and skate to where the puck is going, meaning I try and think a couple of steps ahead of where things are going. Because if everybody right now is focused on the here and now, they're all looking at the picture exactly the same way. It's very difficult to create any sort of differentiation. It's very difficult to be not just lumped into the masses of what's going on.

Narrator: Right?

Brian Gracely: And so, you know, my dad, a lot of times would be like, you know, try and think a couple of steps ahead. Trying to think, okay, this is going on right now. What if A, B and C happen? Okay, well, if A, B and C, you know, if A happens, what. What logically might happen next? If B happens, what might happen next? If C happens, what happened might happen next. And then he would also sort of say, you know, that maybe that's on the positive side of things. Take a look at the negative side of things. What are some things that might happen? And then now you've sort of forced yourself to take a little bit bigger picture of what's going on. You may not. You don't know for sure if those things are going to happen, but you've painted yourself a little bit bigger picture. And again, if you're thinking about that analogy of skate to where the puck is going to be going, not where it is right now, it allows you to start to focus on, well, what skills should I work on? What relationship should I make? What things should I align myself to? Because I think six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, the world is going to be over here. And if I've been focusing on those, if I've been keeping up and showing up every day, uh, in that direction, and you may not get it right, you're going to be in a much better position than if you're just sort of following where the world is right now, and your only view is where the world is right now, and you're only focused on those sort of things, you're not going to be prepared for A world that changes. And you have to recognize that the world is sort of always changing and so forth. So anyways, eight things, uh, sort of Father's Day related, sort of father related. You know, again, some of those may seem more conservative than you want to think about. Some of them may seem more uncertain than you're willing to think about. But, you know, again, you know, dads are always sort of thinking about, like, what have I gone through? What can I pass along to people, how can I view a situation, uh, you know, and try and, you know, both create opportunity but also, you know, have protection on the downside of things. So anyways, just some fatherly advice or at least thinking about, you know, advice my dad gave me in trying to apply it to this AI world where things are a little bit crazy, a little bit uncertain, and sometimes the numbers don't always make sense. So anyways, with that, happy Father's Day. Getting this one out a little bit on a Sunday morning. Hope everybody's doing well because spend some time with family. Hope you get a chance to call dad or, you know, keep up with your kids if you're a father yourself, you know, hug your moms. You know, they're part of the equation as well. And, uh, even though they get a day, they should probably get a whole bunch a day. So anyways, with that, we'll wrap it up. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for telling a friend, and we will talk to you next week. Thanks for listening. Check us out at the enterprise AI.com

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